


Turn Turn Turn

by Merkwerkee



Category: Void Jumpers
Genre: Body Horror, Transformation, how do science work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27373099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Sam's got himself a passenger in his head, one who pops out if he gets exposed to too much Void magic.So, naturally, Tag shoots him with a Void blaster. Thanks, kid
Kudos: 1





	Turn Turn Turn

Sam stumbled over a rough patch of floor as Variq pushed him roughly from behind.

Truth be told, it wasn’t the first time Sam’d been shoved somewhere against his will while wearing handcuffs. Not the first time it’d probably end in the pull of a trigger somewhere quiet without witnesses or mourners, either. No, Sam’s an old hat at this kind of nonsense - and, judging by the way Variq had secured his arms, it wasn’t the parallel’s first rodeo either. Sam had tried every trick in the book - clenched fists, hands presented together in the front, pop-click-unlock pin concealed up his sleeve - and Variq had had none of it; he’d wrenched Sam’s arms around behind him and secured his flattened hands sides together, then patted him down for not only the pin in his sleeve but the knife in his boot.

All of it had been done calmly, coolly, professionally. Not the slightest hint of boredom, which Sam would have exploited the hell out of. Nothing better for an escape plan than bored captors. Sure, some of the sadistic types would torture you for fun if they were bored, but with the prodding you could usually get them to spill the beans at the same time. For most of the other types, all it took was a show of willingness to co-operate or alleviate their boredom, and they’d sing like canaries; if you were really good and pushed the right buttons, they’d get so caught up in what they were saying they’d ignore almost anything you did.

And Sam was a _master_ at pushing buttons.

“Bet your Summoner will have something to say about pushing an honored guest around. Bet you’ll be out of a job when she hears from her daughter about what you’re doing in that secret, secret lab downstairs. Might even be criminal charges attached. Isn’t the method of execution on this planet burning at the stake?”

This guy Variq, though, had refused to rise to any of the bait Sam threw his way; comments about the parallel’s plans, jibes about what the Summoner would do to him for messing with guests, cracks about how he couldn’t possibly hope to get away with it - all of it met with the same non-reaction. It didn’t matter how Sam phrased it or what kind of insinuation he threw into his tone, Variq just kept on moving without changing pace, expression, or breathing pattern.

“Wonder if you’ll be publicly executed or if she’ll keep it private. That’d be a sight, people all gathering up to toast marshmallows on your ashy ass.”

Not that Sam was bringing his A-game; the verbal - and currently somewhat one-sided - repartee was more a cover for his racing thoughts. Not being able to read any of the people in the jail had rattled him, thrown him off - and he’d bought their stupid trick hook, line, and sinker. What were the odds he’d get the right guy on the first try? What were the odds on a servant trying to bare-knuckle fight the second most powerful person in the palace? It’d been too easy, too neat; he should have smelled a rat. Nothing ever came that easy, not in his line of work.

Genuine hurt and regret welled up from the depths of his mind, and he bit off his latest insult to Variq with a curse. The Puq might’ve been able to see through the illusions, sure, but Sam would literally rather set himself on fire before he accepted the spriggan’s help. Sure, maybe he hadn’t been doing the greatest all by his lonesome with three divorces and a run-down office, but things had definitely gone even more to shit after he’d found himself bound to the thing.

Plus, it was always so Void-damned _cheerful_. Insults barely phased it and threats only made it faintly contrite. Sam couldn’t be sure if it was because the thing wasn’t human in the slightest and therefore couldn’t feel anything but cheerful, or if it was a personal failing of the Puq itself. Either way, he’d never willingly give over to it. Not now, not ever. The memory of the Tine who’d disguised themselves as the Puq popped into his mind, and he made sure to concentrate extra hard on what pulling the trigger on it had felt like.

That didn’t quite get the reaction he’d hoped. A wave of reassurance and forgiveness slipped into his brain, and the awareness of the Puq faded. Sam suppressed a snarl of annoyance; that watchful awareness made privacy nearly non-existent and made relaxing a chore. The Puq was very curious, and those kinds of feelings nearly always attracted his attention - resulting in several very awkward evenings back in their cell.

Sam pushed the memory away; they were getting to the end of the secret tunnel, and now wasn’t the time to wallow. The opening mechanism on this side of things was much less arcane than when they’d entered. Variq simply pushed a button on the wall and the door slid open smoothly. The throne room beyond it was slightly more populated than Sam remembered it being; Tag was sitting on the throne.

The kid’s expression was pinched, but he didn’t look at them when they entered. Well, his head did turn and his eyes were kinda pointed towards them but the focus seemed to be somewhere else entirely. Sam didn’t need Variq jerking him to a stop and shoving him to his knees to realize there was something going on that he couldn’t quite make out. The profound silence was part of it, sure - he couldn’t even hear the curtains fluttering in the light breeze - but real big clue was the way the kid flickered in and out like a bad vidcomm signal. It made Sam nauseated just to look at it, though he could feel a thrill of excitement roll down his spine from his unwanted tag-along.

Sam scowled and surreptitiously tested his handcuffs again; anything that made the Puq go _!!!!!_ was something he’d prefer to avoid. But just like the last four times, Variq had done a professional job on cuffing him. Not a bit of give to dislocate a thumb and slip out, not a twist of space to get enough leverage to break them apart, and not a single piece of wire or similar object to pick the locks with. Nothing in reasonable shuffling range either, otherwise he might’ve taken advantage of the staring contest to try.

At least it wasn’t a long wait; less than two minutes after Variq had shoved Sam to the floor, Tag steadied and solidified. Sam could feel a faint disappointment ruffling the back of his mind, but he had more important things to think about. He could see the moment Tag actually saw the scene laid out in front of him instead of whatever the Void he’d been staring at before. He started sweating like a first-time offender at their court date, though his gaze remained remarkably steady. His eyes flickered just the tiniest bit, and he delivered the biggest lie Sam’d heard in a while with enough aplomb that Sam was struck for a moment with the bizarre urge to applaud. Go big or go home, kid; Tag was swinging for the bleachers with this one.

“You make it too hard on yourself, you don’t need to convince me. You said I had friends that mattered; in a sense, that’s true. _Tag_ had friends that mattered. But it seems like we both know that was a mask that I was wearing, even if unbeknownst to me.” Tag delivered the line better than Sam expected, but it still pinged pretty high on his bullshit-o-meter and Sam gave an internal sigh of relief. He’d been afraid he’d lost his touch after the jail, and it was nice to know that he still had it when it mattered. There was a note of truth to it, though, that was mildly concerning; _was_ Tag just a mask?

Sam put that thought aside for later and concentrated on what was happening now; kid had done well enough on the speech, but he needed to work on his sneer. To Sam’s eyes it looked more like the kid’d bitten a lemon than anything else. Sam summoned up a memory of staring down a gun in a particularly fraught case where he’d tracked the purportedly cheating husband to his actual nocturnal habit of running drugs to a local night club. He’d gotten paid, in the end, but it’d been a long and sordid affair that’d been completely hushed up by the bankrollers; either way, the memory let him give the kid his best fuck-you expression and a reasonably pithy one-liner.

“Well, piss on you, man.”

He winced internally but didn’t let it show on his face. Ever since that damn spriggan’d taken up residence in the back of his head, he’d noticed a shift towards cleaner, less vulgar language and it pissed him off. ‘Piss on you, man’ fucking juvenile-ass kind of one-liner that made him look like the worst kind of green kid who didn’t know what they were getting into. It was times like this he wished he could actually punch himself hard enough for the Puq to feel it.

The kid laughed the fakest laugh Sam’d heard since the last time he’d been suckered into going to an upper-crust shindig to get the dirt on a shady business partner. He’d heard laugh tracks that were more convincing, but it seemed to throw Variq for a loop and the man almost stammered through his next sentence.

“I….was tasked with…unrelated things; your being here is…complicating that. But…I was also…told…not to…trust you. It seems maybe…you’ve come around.”

Sam’s scowl faded to a puzzled frown as his mind raced. Just _who_ had tasked Variq with anything? Sam wasn’t exactly the kind of man who hung around in the lofty circles of summoners and parallels - present circumstances excepted because it was definitely the Puq’s fault he was here - but it seemed like the only person who could order a parallel around was their Summoner and possibly whoever trained parallels in the first place. That didn’t leave a lot of suspects in the pool, and none of them were good news. Given the way the Tine had counterfeited people in the jail, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that the Summoner might not be involved in this full stop. He’d be the first to admit parents weren’t perfect, but Bryn hadn’t shown any of the signs he’d expect from a person raised by the kind of psychopath that tortured people to death in secret dungeons; that kind of thing tended to leave a mark on the offspring, one way or the other.

Then, too, there was the question of what the _Void_ , exactly, Variq had been tasked to do. Sam would be the first to admit he didn’t have a clue as to what half the stuff down in the lab did; thanks to the Puq, he had a general idea of what some of the pieces were for, but the whole picture? Nothing like it. Yet whatever it was involved siphons, gems, aerixes, and some kind of lunatic not in evidence. Sam slid his gaze over to where Variq was trying to talk himself into believing the kid’s latest load of horse puckey. The man didn’t _look_ like a lunatic who’d spend three whole pages repeating the word 'traitor’ over and over again, but Sam knew better than most that just because he looked to have it together now didn’t mean he had it together all of the time.

Of course, it didn’t happen to most people quite as literally as it happened to Sam.

Tag was walking towards them now and putting his hand on Variq’s shoulder. A ballsy move, considering the kid appeared to be unarmed; Sam’s ribs were still tender from where Variq had kicked him in their earlier hallway scuffle and Sam was used to taking a beating.

“I haven’t had a change of heart; I’ve had a change of will. And I’ve recognized that what’s happening cannot be stopped. And what better purpose is there than to play one’s role?” Tag’s voice was steady, but Sam could see the subtle bob of a partially concealed swallow, and the kid was sweating bullets.

Variq didn’t seem to see anything, fortunately. “Yesss,” he hissed, and Sam might’ve been a little more concerned about how pleased the guy sounded if Tag hadn’t just stolen the void blaster off him.

 _Shoot him with it_ , he urged silently. _Just bring it up and aim for the eyes, quickest route to the brain._

Instead, the kid took a step back and did that thing with his face again; Tag had very clearly never sneered before in his life, and Sam was struck by a bizarre desire to laugh. Of all the tough scrapes and bad situations he’d been through in his career, and this kid was going to blow it for him. Figured.

“This human’s useless to us; he poses no threat, he’s wasting our time.”

And in one clean motion, Tag brought up the blaster and shot Sam in the chest with it.

“No- no- no!” Sam could barely speak even as the actual force of the blast knocked him backwards into the air. He could feel _it_ starting - it was always his heart, first. The Puq had never explained why, but the first part to make the switch was always his heart. Sam tensed uselessly, trying to fight back the change with everything he was - trying, and failing like always. Still, he had a deep and viscerally _terrifying_ notion of what might happen if he stopped fighting it, so while it always made the pain worse he fought tooth and nail to try and stop the change before it began.

Shredding _pain_ ripped into the muscles of his chest as his heart gave one last feeble beat before becoming a many-pointed crystal. His lungs caught on the jagged spires as they always did, and he could feel the air leaking out of them even as they in turn began to harden and change. His lungs always heralded a bigger section making the switch - ribs and diaphragm, and the first of the external crystals pushing out against the back of his shirt. Guts were next, the vital organs in the thorax - each one crushed a little more by the weight of the ones before it until it, too, was joining with the rest as Void crystal. More external crystals as well, sheathing his front and burning away at his shirt.

Nerves _screamed_ until the crystalline structure overtook them, then screamed anyway as his brain desperately tried to fill in the blanks where nerves _should_ be. Sam also suspected that part of it was his brain trying to figure out what the hell the Void crystal was sending it, because the Puq could always move somehow, but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was it hurt, hurt like a hit to the funny bone except it was his entire torso.

Arms were next, bones turning into spears of the crystal more than twice the length of the originals and tearing at their muscle attachments before the muscles, too, turned. Big spars pushed out from his shoulders, counter-balancing the heavy hands and - when it got there - head. Joints seized and cracked as they became the crystalline substance that made up the Puq - completely destroying the wrist restraints in the process - and Sam could feel the alien consciousness at once unutterably strange and unbearably familiar start to flex them a little.

That was the worst part. Sam could deal with pain; pain was an old friend more familiar to him than his battered trench coat. It was the fact that he was helpless in his own head, unable to do anything but watch as the Puq blundered about a world that wasn’t designed for it, making social gaffes and breaking things with equal aplomb and an almost childlike delight. The crystal had robbed him of his voice already; however the Puq spoke, Sam still needed lungs and air to make sounds, and right now he had neither.

The crystallization went down his legs, next. Bones first again, heavy plating replacing kneecaps and heavy, four-toed slabs replacing the feet. Almost two more feet in height as well, the replacing crystal redoubling the original bone length. The Puq was stronger now too, more present in their shared consciousness; Sam almost wished that the change would bring him oblivion. No matter how much control the Puq had, Sam always got to feel every last excruciating part of the turn as nerves screamed with energies they weren’t meant to carry before being silenced in the worst possible way. He never blacked out, never forgot the feeling - yet somehow it was never any better, each turn never inuring him to any of the pain from the next.

It crept up his throat, crunching audibly in the echo chamber of his own skull as his vertebrae and trachea were overtaken by the winding purple crystals. Once the organs crystallized, they merged of course - if you somehow managed to split the Puq open, you wouldn’t find crystallized organs inside - yet they never switched over that way. It was always one at a time marching up to the last one - his brain. Fortunately, that always ended the pain; with nothing left to generate phantom signals from nerves that no longer existed, Sam got some kind of relief from the physical agony of the change.

The change itself always felt like it took an eternity, one blinding moment of pain stretching into hours of it as Sam fought, but in reality it never took more than a few seconds. The Puq oof’d as they landed, though their landing didn’t truly hurt, and sat up as Bryn and Rex made their way into the room.

“Hey guys! Y'all’re in trouble! Sam’s _pissed_!”

_Damn right he was._


End file.
